Brick by brick, Lego takes Hollywood

By
Euronews

Bounding along with a kind of crazed, caffeinated energy, ‘The Lego Movie’ is a classic quest story about Emmet – an average, law-abiding, man made out of bricks – who is mistakenly drafted into a fellowship to stop the evil Lord Business from world domination.

Chris Pratt, who voices the leading character in the English language version, mapped out the drama for us: “The movie follows a very average construction worker by the name of Emmet. He’s completely average and living in this sort of Orwellian type of world, Bricksberg, where everything is awesome and everybody follows the rules. It’s kind of creepy, somewhere between America and North Korea. So, he lives there and everything is awesome. But he realises that by following the rules, he’s essentially become invisible. Nobody knows who he is. He’s very much become a normal guy that’s not special. And then something happens, and he’s given the opportunity to do something extraordinary to save the universe.”

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the film stars the vocal talents of Elizabeth Banks, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman and Will Ferrell, among others.

For Ferrell, who voices the tyrannical ruler of Bricksberg, it was the film’s innate rebellious sensibility which persuaded him to sign up: “As soon as I was presented with the concept I thought, ‘That’s a really unique one: the idea of whether or not you should follow the rules when you play with your Lego set or throw the rules out the window’. That’s the big question in the movie. And so I loved the fact that Lego was open to that kind of criticism about their product.”